10 Interesting facts about electric cars

For anyone curious or interested to learn more about electric vehicles or cars, here are 10 interesting facts to get started with.

1. Electric cars use batteries or other energy storage devices instead of the internal combustion engine using petroleum.

2. Some of the main benefits include less air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, less dependence on gas or foreign oil, less costly when other forms of energy generation are available, and it’s quieter, making a smoother transportation experience.

3. With using energy from batteries or other storage devices that you’ll occasionally recharge, this opens the door for generation sources such as solar, wind, and other renewable technologies. Other technologies occasionally used include with supercapacitors, flywheels, and solar cars.

4. Batteries technologies that are currently used include lithium-ion and its’ variants, lead acid batteries, NiCd batteries, NiMH batteries, Nickel iron, and ones in development include Zinc-air, Molten salt batteries, and Zinc-bromine flow batteries.

5. The price for electric vehicles is probably the biggest barrier for mainstream adoption, with most people not willing to pay more for an electric car than a combustion engine one. The cost for electric cars is largely driven by the battery cost, although this is also moving forward going from $1,300 USD per kWh (kilowatt hour) in 2007, to $500 in 2012, and targeted for $300 in 2015, and $125 by 2022.

6. The annual fuel cost is about $500-$600 USD per year for most electric vehicles (charging costs), versus about $1,000 for a gasoline-electric hybrid, and about $2,300 for an average gasoline only new car.

7. One alternative to battery recharging before going forward is battery replacement, such as with buses for major events and some stations for regular vehicle use (in California and Boston).

9. It’s estimated that by 2020 10% of all cars will run only on battery power and 30% of all new cars purchased will be battery only or hybrids.

10. Japan has sold the most electric vehicles worldwide, followed by the US, China, France, and Norway. Norway has more than 10,000 electric cars registered, making it the highest EV ownership per capita (albeit still at 0.3% of their total number of cars).

Organize research for your own electric car purchase

If you’re thinking about having your own electric car, whether for general use or making an EV as a hobby, you can use an Odysen network to help organize it. Here are a few benefits from doing so:

Privacy: Have a network just for yourself or share it with others that are involved with the decision.

Separate networks: With Odysen, you can have as many networks as you want, as appropriate for your different activities and keeping content focused for each. They can be a completely separate network or a sub-network from an existing one.

Easy to organize: Add a folder for each of the EV models you’re considering. Within each folder are applications to share content with.

Using for reference: This could be bookmarking useful website links, such as EV manufacturers and dealers, add appropriate EV blogs to the news reader, store research papers or office files in the Documents application.

Ongoing: After you purchase or are using your EV, you can keep your network for occasional reference or storing usage information. This can be helpful as EV technology is still relatively new, things change, it can be important to document and stay informed about your vehicle from a central place. This being having both reference content and your usage info integrated in one place for easy reference.

Learn more about having your own network for travel, a hobby, or research, including application examples, key benefits, and other relevant blog articles.

Published by

Matt

Founder and CEO of Odysen, involved with different writing and music freelancing activities, and have previously worked for larger technology businesses in the US, Europe and Asia.
View all posts by Matt